[KKairos]

CARD KNIGHTS

This game will eventually see a proper dMZX release. Right now it's mostly in testing on someone's Dropbox. Basically it's a 2-player card game running on a play-by-email-esque structure using Dropbox or other shared services such as Google Drive or BTSync.



Here's an example of a starting hand:



There's a fairly extensive manual with writeups on different cards here: http://www.darganflayer.net/ck/ . The latest 6 cards aren't included yet, except in a brief editor shot at the bottom.

The notion of the project as a "BakedBeans" collaboration comes from the fact that it owes its existence largely in part to a dedicated group of people who frequented the now-defunct IRC channel "#bakedbeans" wherein we discussed lots of game creation elements, and made crazy projects, usually hosted in someone's Dropbox. The state of play, balancing, and even some mechanical choices owe their wisdom to those fine folks, in particular Thud and TheJMan, who may actually love this game more than I do, and ElectroManiacal earlier on, when my goal was basically to break his playstyle every time I changed a thing. It is a KKairos game, but I've kept a cadre of close advisors on the project and in a sense it's theirs, too. If this thing ever goes commercial, I know where I'm looking first for teammates. Speaking of, I partook of the GMStudio Humble Bundle recently and hope to get that going at some point, but the framework that already exists in MZX is best for playtesting and refining the overall metagame.

The final game is likely to be fairly abstract and plotless. Eventually I'll probably make a single-player mode with relatively awful AI. In the meantime, if you want to join in testing, let me know and I'll see what I can do. I have a temporary Dropbox folder set up for testing with both IRL and MZX people, and I'm open to adding new folks to it.

Eventually I hope to get the game to about 70-80 unique cards, to keep the cards and viable strategies disparate enough for a stable metagame where no single style of deck dominates. We'll see if I hit that mark.

Features implemented:
* 2-player play
* Battle theater
* In-game chat

Features on the docket:
* Mouse control
* Mid-match save/load
* AI Opponent

Card mechanics/suggestions on the docket*:
* Mana burn / charge drain
* Nullifying "unblockable" damage or other "next turn" effects
* Charge or defense based on damage taken previous turn
* More *step/momentum variants
* Will be updated as this thread necessitates. Right now it's 2:20 AM and I have to work tomorrow, so I'll update this some tomorrow night.

PROJECT SLEEP
This game will not be fairly abstract and plot-less. Not talking plot much though.

https://youtu.be/BvYoe3aA8vk

[Dr Lancer-X]

suggestion: AI opponent for those of us without friends (all of us)

i don't mean a full-on one, and i haven't read the rules but if there's a way to set up a simple ai that can play through fairly simple pre-designed decks and still pose a reasonable challenge that would work fine

[KKairos]

It might not pose a great challenge but it should be enough. Added the feature.

[Verasev]

Looks neat. I look forward to giving this a try.

[CJA]

i still need to hop on the dropbox and get owned at this sometime

[KKairos]

Version 100616a:

Working on mouse support. The menu part is functional but has an aesthetic issue for lists less than 5 items total. (Relevant for profile selection and battle theater.) Deck editing is not at all functional yet and I'm not sure it will become functional, or if it does, I'm going to have to do things differently.

Then moving on to the other thing, the battle thing. We'll see how that goes.

Card suggestions are still welcome. CJA, feel free to hop on at this point, and Verasev/Lancer-X, if you actually want to give this a shot sometime I can probably arrange a folder-share to make that happen.

[KKairos]

MOUSE CONTROL is in. Finally.

Thud got me to do so by hacking in a mouse engine from awhile ago. Slight display delay in certain circumstances, but that might be fixable still, we'll see.

At any rate, I'm pretty stoked about this.

[Old-Sckool]

is there a BakedBeans card?

[KKairos]

There could be, but I'll have to think extensively about what it would do. Maybe I'll make it the last card put into the game, at least the basic set.

Made a brief foray into HTML-format match recordings. I actually got the formatting OK so far, but it requires so much more than that, as it's doing lots of things wrong. Kibosh on that for now while I work on a better deck-building interface. Once versioning gets more stable (haha, says anyone who's ever been there when I'm updating Card Knights) I'll probably put out a test build or two, including an AI mode, so that people who want to can have an opponent to practice with and also the ability to host a shared folder with DBox/BTSynce/gDrive.

[KKairos]

Working on some data things/code optimizations, reworking recording data. Not going to try and make this thing create HTML files yet; that's a little bit nuts for the moment.

[KKairos]

What Was I Thinking? code of the day:

loop start
set "$str" to ""
loop for 9

[Dr Lancer-X]

yeah, what were you thinking?

everyone knows you need 35 passes to securely erase data

loop start
set "$str" to ""
loop for 34

[KKairos]

Working on battle theater now. Overhauled most of the menus to make it much easier to make the mouse click things. Next on the agenda will probably be the pile of card suggestions, spectator mode for watching a match in progress, battle animations/sounds, and reworking data as necessary so the game can handle > 16 profiles at once, etc.

[KKairos]

https://www.youtube....h?v=BvYoe3aA8vk

[Dr Lancer-X]

Beautiful character animation.

[KKairos]

Yeah, I actually sucked it up and used a reference on that one. If I can actually maintain the same love for all the character sprites it could be a pretty well-animated game.

For the record, though, not happy with environmental colors...So any thoughts there are welcome.

[Dr Lancer-X]

I dunno. You could try upping the green of the dark blue sky a little. That will throw the nice purple off, so you'll have to fiddle with that. After those colours are right it might be preferable to start shifting the hue of the grey castle colours. I note that they're slightly red currently - but it might look better if it's a little bit closer to the sky to make it more subtle. Reducing the contrast of the different greys will also help in that regard.

[KKairos]

Thanks, that advice helped. Also did some character work on the tileset:

[Graham]

Hey KK, it's looking really great! Keep up the good work. I love to see more sprite based 2D sidecrollers in development in MegaZeux.

[KKairos]

since last update:
- rewrote a lot of the engine for better modular loading including a maps.txt file which tells the game what to load and where
- rewrote the maps.txt loader for better parsing and saner look
- some reworked composition
- stuff yall have seen in screenshot thread like textbox engine, new sword slash etc.
- palette work
- new area work
- basic plan complete for world map, working on the story outline still, but almost exclusively in my head
- got a Trello board up and secured beta testers, including a couple of MZXers and a couple of people from my "real life"
- did some thinking about what/how to name things because I want the symbols in this game to actually mean something/reference things, and named my main character accordingly (only the Popes know what it is ATM)
- wrote some item descriptions
- implemented some traps
- attempted to record a better whoosh sound for swords than I made with bfxr but you can tell it's a capella
- there might even be a little vocal talent behind <main character's> voice to replace the Mario-esque jump

to do, including broad strokes and important minutiae:
- make lots of enemies
- design/plan the intricacies of lots of rooms including shortcuts
- figure out how to announce new areas
- boss battles (I have one boss conceptualized but basically only in form)
- map secrets and shortcuts
- symbols: you'll find various symbols to help you on your journey and i have implemented exactly zero of them, go me!
- custom save format: need to do this pretty early on so that beta testers, including yours truly, can test the game as it's developed and not have to replay the whole darn thing when I update it. also, i'll be able to make a save-file editor to start myself off at a certain state of play for testing reasons, e.g. making sure a boss is basically functional before i torture the beta-test subjects with it.
- make the game pause
- streamline directory structure: need to eventually move .chr files somewhere else and .mzms as well; right now main directory is pretty crowded
- give the player a menu so they can access the wonderful item descriptions and see the character progress
- fix bugs, bugs, bugs

possible things that would be more of a stretch than things i really want to do
- custom .mzm format for smaller filesize and more 'cryptic' data than .mzms.

lastly here have a screenshot (x/post to WIP thread)

[KKairos]

done since last update:
- fixed 1 bug
- opening menu with save wiping option for beta testers and save display so you can see what you're loading, and where the player is
- custom save format
- 3 new coordinates
- drew first boss sprite

still to do, including broad strokes and important minutiae, new items in bold
- make lots of enemies
- design/plan the intricacies of lots of rooms including shortcuts
- figure out how to announce new areas
- boss battles (I have one boss conceptualized but basically only in form)
- map secrets and shortcuts
- symbols: you'll find various symbols to help you on your journey and i have implemented exactly zero of them, go me!
- make the game pause
- streamline directory structure: need to eventually move .chr files somewhere else and .mzms as well; right now main directory is pretty crowded with bs
- give the player an in-game menu so they can access the wonderful item descriptions and see the character progress
- create and fix more bugs, bugs, bugs
- intro sequences
- plotting. going to be a pretty basic plot, though
- lots of sounds
- map viewing system to see explored vs unexplored areas
- speed-run/time-clock mode, or at least an official in-game clock, b/c one beta tester started speedrunning after the first beta had a clock so people would know how long the game was taking to beat so far.

[Graham]

The map viewing system sounds like a really cool idea. Can't wait to see how that looks. I like the idea of a speed run/time clock mode. Thinking about doing something like that in my game too.

[KKairos]

Haha, it's just going to be a small Metroidy map, pretty basic.

[KKairos]

done since last update:
- 4 new coordinates drafted/playable in theory, not yet filled
- world basically mapped out
- fixed directory structure so it looks like it was organized by someone with organizational skill and not by me

overarching/design/battle cleanliness:
- rethink secret obviousness
- design/plan the intricacies of lots of rooms including shortcuts
- plotting. going to be a pretty basic plot, though
- map secrets and shortcuts
- figure out if there will be much difficult platforming and what form it will take

large/frequent practicalities:
- make a few more enemies (downgraded from "a lot more" b/c if I do it right it'll work out OK)
- make at least 1 new type of trap "trigger"
- figure out how to announce new/returned areas
- 'sequencer' object so one trap trigger can trigger multiple traps in time (say that five times fast!)
- symbols: you'll find various symbols to help you on your journey and i have implemented exactly zero of them, go me!
- make the game pause
- finish proper object population and polishing for all rooms in the game

small-but-large practicalities:
- boss battles (I have one boss conceptualized but basically only in form)
- give the player an in-game menu so they can access the wonderful item descriptions and see the character progress
- intro/ending sequences
- map view system to see explored vs unexplored areas
- design at leas 3 more areas

important minutiae:
- create and fix more bugs, bugs, bugs
- lots of sounds
- speed-run/time-clock mode, or at least an official in-game clock, b/c one beta tester started speedrunning after the first beta had a clock so people would know how long the game was taking to beat so far.
- find entertaining errors to compete with Graham (j/k)
- adjust levels to make sure the player can learn game dynamics naturally, at a good pace, and ideally with as little explicit instruction as possible

[Graham]

KKairos, on 14 January 2017 - 05:27 PM, said:

- find entertaining errors to compete with Graham (j/k)

KKairos, on 14 January 2017 - 05:27 PM, said:

- adjust levels to make sure the player can learn game dynamics naturally, at a good pace, and ideally with as little explicit instruction as possible

Yep. Same here. Man that balancing stuff is tricky. Seems you have a pretty good grasp of what needs done.